The Internet provides a convenient way of allowing people to search and purchase licenses for using selected media data, such as digital images, video clips audio files etc. Today, there are several digitally enabled image agencies and stock libraries which specialize in the retrieval and sale of images via the Internet, such as Corbis®, Getty Images (1996-2004 Getty Images, Inc.), Comstock (2004 Comstock Images, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Jupitermedia Corporation) and the like. Users who wish to buy digital images or licenses to use such digital images, are normally required to look in one or more agencies and accurately facilitate the retrieval of media data via such image agencies, by performing a search on the media classification systems developed and maintained by the agencies themselves and in their related databases. This can prove problematic, as the number of specializing visual assets agencies increase, and therefore most of those agencies are not known to the user, and particularly in view of the fact that the amount of media data available through thee agencies databases is not reachable via public search engines, such as Google™, Yahoo!® and the like.
Search engines algorithms such as Google™, Yahoo!®, MSN of Microsoft Corporation, etc., perform continuous indexing of billions of web pages (including their text, images, and other data types) by means of crawler/spider software. Usually, it is used to locate HTML pages or other types of pages by their content or by following hypertext links from one page to another. Said algorithms are used to find new Web pages, that are then summarized and indexed.
The web pages are indexed according to several ranking mechanisms that vary between the search engines. In general, each web page is indexed according to its text elements, the links to other sites, the URL and other parameters. The sophisticated algorithms of the search engines rank each web page according to “popularity” measurements such as relevant links and hits to the URL, the context of the web page, the files included within it, and more.
Some of the search engines provide image galleries section (for example, “Google images” link, see FIG. 1), which enables the search engine users to retrieve images. Some of those search engines also provide a second level interface of the said image section (see FIG. 2), that contains the images that were obtained from the indexed web sites and URLs. As explained above, the images, in some similarity to the text indexing, are also indexed according to their file type/name/size and the text that appears around them in the web page. This enables a user to retrieve images in the same manner as people search for text. While a search for the terms “dog AND cat” in the main search box will provide URLs that contain text and/or information about dogs and cats, searching by the image section of the search engine interface (e.g., Google™ Images or Yahoo! Images) will retrieve the images that are associated with Dog/Cat according to the file name and/or text and/or the meta-tag that appear close to the image (e.g., see FIGS. 1 and 2).
The public search engines galleries contain billions of images (e.g., as of April 2005 Google™ alone contains about 1.2 billion images). These images hereinafter “visual assets”) are the property of their owners and appear in various WWW sites. Some search engines also support many languages, and may also suggest corrections and alternatives to a misspelled text or query. This is an additional advantage of the use public search engine galleries over the stock image libraries internal engines. Typically, in a public gallery, when a user clicks on an image, a preview page of a second level interface (see FIG. 2), is opened. In addition to the image thumbnail, the user can see the user can see the preview of the web page in which the image appears. Usually, the user can then link to the target page.
Search Engines Optimizers (SEO) are dedicated software/systems/methods that aid to increase the rank of a URL within search engine search results. Most of the new visitors to each specific website access that website following the use of a search engine. For example, it is known in the art that for business practices, the higher ranked the URL is in the search results, the higher the expected traffic is to the web site is, and the higher the probability is to make a business transaction. There are several ways to cause web pages to become efficiently indexed and relatively highly ranked by a third party search engine algorithm, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,278,992 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,725,259.
There are users who wish to buy visual assets such as stock photography, cliparts, illustrations and others, in particular the Art buyer's population (e.g., advertisers, publishers, designers, etc.). As said, one of the methods to get the visual file is to buy it from a dedicated stock library (such as Corbis, Gettyimages and others).
As their way of doing busyness, the stock libraries or agencies produce a digital file and define it by keywords, so it can be retrieved from its database and be purchased. Even though some of the stock agencies are selling via the web and have a very high trafficked web site, the images are retrieved from the internal database and therefore do not appear in the public search engines' image gallery (e.g., Google Images). Therefore, a user who wishes to buy a visual asset must search in each agency database, and, if he does not find a desired image, he must try to search for it in another agency or image source. Therefore, a search for an image can be tedious and annoying, and may take a relatively long period of time and much effort.
Due to lack of a centralized place for presenting all the purchasable visual assets, and the increasing massive attraction of the public search engines, the art buyers may tend to try to perform a keyword search in the public search engine galleries first. In that case, when the art buyer finds a desired image in the public gallery, he has to locate the image owner in order to negotiate pricing. In many cases, the images retrieved by the public search engines are not for sale, or the owner identity is unknown. Therefore, the art buyer needs to continue searching for another image, or to try to continue spending time in order to locate the owner of the desired image. In other cases, lack of ability to contact the image owner, increases the tendency to download the image file from the public image gallery, or from the web site in which the image is found, while violating copyrights. The art described so far have not yet provided a satisfactory solution to the problem of retrieving visual assets for purchase via public search engines. The present invention will provide the user with the ability to identify purchasable images from many image sources, and with friendly retrieval options such as multi language search and spelling engine.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method enabling the user to search and purchase visual assets via familiar search processes and tools such as public search engines.
It is another object of the present invention to enable the user to easily identify those purchasable visual assets within the results of public galleries search engines image sections.
Other objects and advantages of the invention will become apparent as the description proceeds.